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Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
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WE DID NOT ASSIGN PATRICK TO GET THIS HIGH
By Brock Wilbur
On a weeknight evening in the San Fernando Valley, i found myself bumming a cigarette from a fellow stand-up comedian. It was 2013. He was a young, fresh-faced comedian who I discovered was from KC originally. It was a thrill to meet Patrick Moore, argue about sports, and reminisce on fond childhood memories of The Cheesecake Factory on the Plaza.
Pat and I were both supposed to perform as openers for another comic—a drive-time radio DJ at one of the city’s biggest alternative rock stations. This venue had been rented out to serve as the recording for his hour-long stand-up comedy special. Between the landmark occasion and his huge fanbase, we were delighted to be performing for his crowd.
Not a single person showed up. Patrick and I stood outside, continuing to smoke, convinced that somehow hundreds of people must be entering the theater from a different, secret entrance that we were not privy to viewing. Nope. At some point, the radio host called it off, leaving Patrick and me to walk back to our cars, engaged in a short exchange that boiled down to: “Hm. Maybe this career is wildly depressing, and we should get out of it?”
We did. Good for us.
When I moved to Kansas City, I was delighted to find Patrick had re-established himself here as well. His quick wit was being put to use as the producer and on-air co-host for a drive-time radio show on one of the city’s biggest stations. I joked with him at several points about how he had followed an unfortunate destiny and had become the man responsible for us committing ritualistic Seppuku with our own comedy careers by doing radio— but Pat was like, y’know, actually good at this.
Shortly thereafter, Patrick was fired for spending too much time on-air complaining about how his corporate overlords insisted on repeatedly playing Imagine Dragons, despite Imagine Dragons sucking shit. Honestly, an S-Tier way to lose your job.
In the wake of Patrick’s newfound time, he began writing stories for The Pitch. What followed was a series of gonzo documentations where Patrick would seek out the best and weirdest events in KC, get exceptionally high on edibles, and recount his adventures. These columns began to be known as “We Did Not Assign Patrick To Do This.”
Pat’s Mary Jane-influenced adventures around the metro are—for lack of better terminology—intoxicating. The man never uses drugs as a crutch or replacement for genuine talent in writing but as a gateway to a release from pressures and internal emotional debilitations, freeing him to experience our community absolved of the weight that tethers the rest of us to terra firma.
When Patrick goes to catch The Play That Goes Wrong on 300mg of THC at a local dinner theatre—a show wherein the entire stage collapses and jettisons an actor into space—the childlike wonderment of his review and the specific laugh that I know he let fly throughout makes for some of the purest experiential work that crosses my desk. When Patrick ingests a Honeybee Salted Brownie Batter chocolate bar CBD/THC combo candy at a KC Current game, it is his fault and his fault alone that a mascot Easter bunny wandering the stadium teleports our stoned reporter directly to Hell itself.
Illustration by Cassondra Jones
As Twitter user @_n0_one once posted: “I feel like everything Patrick Moore has ever done for The Pitch is like he heard ‘No one has ever died from marijuana’ as a challenge.”
And that is why we have, for legal purposes, never assigned Patrick to do anything.
The cult of personality around Patrick Moore’s joyous approach to our city has taken him into several long-running podcasts for The Pitch, including a ranking show for celebrating/debating the pinnacles of KC culture and food, to a weekly movie review show that loops in our entire extended film review family.
But then, Pat got called to the majors. Now, you can find him as the on-air producer for Codie & Zeke In The Morning on 106.5 FM The Wolf, where he keeps the show roped in just as often as he lets it off the leash. More visually, you can catch him as a resident film reviewer on Fox 4’s Great Day KC, where his weekly cinema round-ups are Siskel & Ebert with just the right implied nod of Fox insisting “We Did Not Assign Patrick To Get This High.” More importantly, he always dresses in character for the films he’s reviewing, and honestly, we don’t know where he finds the budget for screen accurate Top Gun flight suits or high-end bodysuits of The Flash. But it sure is fun to watch.
With this month’s annual 4/20-themed magazine, we’ve got a ton of great stories that all come Pat-approved—from a pot catering company and infused beverages, to an eco-terrorism film score created on a steady diet of joints and Smash Brothers, to a look at how conversion from the metric system might be keeping Missourians with possession charges in prison.
Finally, it is our pleasure to announce the next phase of the Patrick Cinematic Universe today, as we welcome the man and the legend back into our fold. The Pitch has a new daily podcast, available every weekday morning, featuring the best news you can use (and a lot more) wherever you get your podcasts. The Pitch presents: The Brittany & Patrick Show features Mr. Moore alongside beloved KC comedian, TikTok star, and The Bachelor critic Brittany Tilander. The first few episodes are already out, and we couldn’t be prouder to have our journalism broadcast through their (lack of) filters.
Pitch in and we’ll make it through,
